Take a Drink
by cydonic
Summary: Tony's always wanted to prove to his father he was worthwhile. He never got the chance.


Take a drink.

If they had a family motto - _do_ they have a family motto? Tony must ask Pepper - it would be that. Take a drink. Tony inherited it from his father, but beyond that, he's not sure. He's not really known his family beyond his mother and his father - the curse of an only child with parents who may have been only children themselves or just not that interested in their siblings.

There are no aunts or uncles, grandparents or cousins, there is just Howard and Maria and Tony in a house too big to feel love.

It's Tony and his mother playing on the part of the Malibu coast they own (his family home is where his current mansion stands, but he didn't like the old place and built his own on top of it), it's his father on a sun chair and he's got a choice: his son on the rocks or his scotch the same way, and Tony knows what he prefers, no matter his young age.

On that day it's Tony jumping around a rockpool, discovering jellyfish that got stuck in the tiny lake once the tide went back out.

He slips on a rock covered in algae and falls into the pool. Tony manages to both hit the back of his head and agitate a jellyfish into stinging his calf, and his screaming would shatter a less expensive glass, but only the best for Howard Stark.

It's his mother who saves him, gently cradling his crying form against her chest. Tony clings to her, his matted, bloody hair staining her blouse, but she doesn't care.

"He needs to toughen up." His father observes dryly from his seat, and pours himself another drink.

_(he laughs, as rich as his taste in bourbon - "that's how we've always been" - and it burns all the same.)_

School is a love-hate for Tony.

What he loves is the attention there. The teacher lavishes praise on him as if his presence in her class is equivalent to the second coming of Christ. Tony has no flaw: he completes every assignment to the best of his ability, an easy A+ every time, and his arm aches from being in the air all the time.

He is _that_ child, raised out of his seat as if his arm is attached to an invisible string, finger snapping to draw attention to himself. The other students are lukewarm. Some gravitate towards him because of his intelligence and good humour, hoping to fall into the teacher's good graces by proximity. Other students scoff when he gets all the answers right, but it is Tony who tops the multiplication chart for the fifth week in a row _not_ them so it doesn't bother him, not really.

What Tony hates about school is how an A+ is never good enough. The Principal's Award is not placed on the fridge because it shouldn't just _be_ the principal of a pathetic primary school (it is, in fact, the best school money can buy, as is the whiskey in the bar) acknowledging Tony. He's moved up a grade due to his intelligence, but it's just not enough. Not even the circuit board he presents his father, aged four (and only getting better since then), is going to appease him.

It's his father, leaning over him with breath strong enough to get him drunk, disassembling a car engine like it's nothing - like it's the seven times tables Tony has just memorised when the rest of his class is still on the threes, and he can recite the parts of the engine in similar order: seven, fourteen, twenty-one, cylinder, piston, valves.

As if the task personally offends him, Howard scowls and labels each part on a piece of paper, leaving in front of Tony the following for the night: all the parts of the engine, set out in order, and a half-dozen drunkenly scrawled instructions for him to follow.

Tony spends the night there - he ignores his English assignment in favour of getting everything just right, and his mother carries him to bed covered in grease.

_("in the end it will fill your head and heart and mind and soul, and that's all you'll ever want")_

Dummy is the first thing Tony is _actually_ proud of.

It takes him weeks over the summer. He's stolen his father's things, here and there, and he _knows_ it's bad (Tony can hear him yell when he's missing a screwdriver, cables, sheet metal, yelling at his mother and _that _hurts more than anything) but his father will be proud of him this time.

Tony's sure of it.

Everything is constructed perfectly, Tony is certain. He's got all his father's books, spread out on his bedroom floor beside the pieces that will make up his first robot.

The purpose of Dummy, Tony doesn't know. It's not a humanoid robot, far from it: there's an arm that can be controlled independent of the body, a small box on wheels, essentially. Fine movements aren't programmed in yet, but Dummy can carry large objects. Pick them up, too, but with not as much accuracy as Tony would like.

Still, as Dummy finishes his first job, crossing the room with Tony's school bag in his metal grip, Tony feels this sudden swell of pride that nothing could dampen.

Until his father sees it.

He looks over Dummy with scorn - the poorly soldered wires, the mismatched scraps of metal Tony used, the jerky robotics. "Nice try." He says, and returns to his project, something Tony's not allowed to know about.

And that was the nicest thing he ever said.

_("you're a letdown" and he is crouched in the corner of his room, watching with single malt eyes)_

The scales tip from love to hate as Tony takes a grade every semester.

The kids hate him more because they're out playing soccer and he's creating robots at recess, more and more complex each time.

They hate him because the teacher can see no wrong with him, even when Tony is strong enough to push kids over just to prove something to himself.

To prove something to his father.

Because Tony Stark is _not_ a letdown, and he knows it - he's so sure of it, that he refuses to let his father tell him otherwise, but at the same time that's all he has to go by, all he can aspire to be. He desperately clings to the hand that pushes him and holds him down, tells him he's worthless, and that's the other children in the playground who don't like him - _worthless_ because they can't build an engine like he can and what must their parents think if Tony's dad _hates_ him for how he is now?

Middle school and high school are blurs. Tony graduates younger and younger each time, more alienated as he goes along.

But his mother still sits front row everytime, and she smiles and tosses her hair back over her shoulder with a move that reminds Tony of the sun shaking off the clouds that try to hide how luminous it truly is.

"He's proud of you." She says and she hugs him and he holds onto her like she's his everything, which she really is. "He just has a funny way of showing it."

_(with outstretched hand, he pours another glass. "it's a man's world, it requires a man's drink.")_

The first time he drinks is in college, which actually comes as a surprise to most.

At college, Tony is something of a novelty. All the people look at him, they all want to talk to him and hang out with him because he's _different_. Tony is the tinder, they are the spark, and suddenly he's on _fire_.

He only burns brighter when he drinks.

Tony does not live on-campus, and so the arrangement of parties at his is easy. All through college there are people who spend days - weeks - on end living with him, and sometimes Tony knows who they are and sometimes he doesn't.

It really doesn't bother him.

Tony has his house filled with people who pretend to care, and every night there is some kind of party. It's his money they like him for, Tony knows this, but buying the love of other people is so easy. Maybe that's where he went wrong with his father - Howard had all the money in the world, and Tony just couldn't compete with that.

Tony sends back home, in his first semester of college alone, the follow:

• his timetable for the semester which, alone, is worth 24 credits.

• a floorplan of the house Tony occupies, sketched up late at night, laid over a sketch he's made of the floorplan of the family home from memory, sent on a night when he's bored and lonely and wants to share something of his new life with his old one.

• several photocopies from his learning guide for the semester. Such excerpts include: three typos from the unit coordinators, one completely _wrong_ description of how one might revolutionise the field of small aircraft propulsion (Tony has already worked out a solution and mailed it to NASA - it seems like something they might enjoy), and a mention of Howard Stark as the father of modern weapons that Tony thinks he will like.

• his first assignment, a high distinction.

• the following eight assignments, of a same, exceptional grade.

• the letter he received from the Dean for outstanding achievement.

His mother responds to all of his letters. His father does not.

But everyone around him is impressed, or are pretending to be, and Tony indulges himself more and more.

_("you'll never be me." he says, hands a vice on his own wrists, "not without your blood on fire.")_

After that semester Tony no longer sends anything home to his family.

Tony really stops caring entirely.

He still graduates young - the youngest MIT graduate ever, seventeen, already drinking. Tony has learned from the best minds the world has seen, all of whom have worked with, or have aspired to work with, his father. And still the lesson that sticks with him, after all this time, is this: _you'll never be good enough_.

Because all those great minds tell him the same thing, with different words, and Tony's smart enough to know what they mean. _"Maybe one day you'll be as good as your father." _(but Tony knows he won't be because his father already told him so, told him enough that he knows without a shadow of a doubt), _"you could always ask your father how he did it, that man is an inspiration"_ (but Tony knows he can't because every question he asks is met with silence or _"Maria, entertain your son" _and it's always _your_ son, never _our_ son or _my _son, and never - _never_ - will Tony be an inspiration, not like his father) and _"just give it a few more years."_ (because Tony doesn't _have_ a few more years, he has here and now and he has to do _something_).

_("wash it away" it's not a suggestion, it's a demand, glass in hand.)_

It is that Tony comes to live under his father's shadow for the next three years.

Everything he makes is eclipsed by his father who makes it bigger, better, more fantastic than Tony ever could.

But Tony doesn't want to impress the public. It's out of some kind of publicity stunt anyway that Tony has become the youngest engineer on the Stark Industries books. His father told him as much - don't look, don't touch, build something every so often and smile for the cameras.

All Tony ever wanted was to impress his father.

The workmanship that got him honours in college is met with a tight-lipped frown, as if the sight of the robot/phone/gun/missile/car engine is disgusting to his father. Not worth his time.

Time is money and Howard Stark is worth a lot of money. More than Tony could ever imagine.

And so when he dies, Tony should be happy. That's what he thinks.

Because now the weight is lifted up off him. There are no expectations. There is a company laid out before him, the world that admires him for his (inherited) genius and talent, people who _need_ him. Tony has never been needed in that way, and it's startling.

He doesn't cry at first, not when his mother and father leave him - abruptly (Tony can't bring himself to say too soon). He looks sad for the cameras, and that's half-lie half-reality because he _is_ sad. He never got the chance to prove his father wrong - that he could be worthwhile.

No matter what he makes, he always looks on it with that critical eye: the welding is messy, the wire could be shortened and neatened up a little, why is that report so loud - _silence it, you idiot_.

But maybe this will be it. Maybe this will be the one thing his father could be proud of him for.

The Jericho sits at his side.

Take a drink.

And then it's showtime.


End file.
